Low life | 10 May 2018

Should I or shouldn’t I go and see The Death of Stalin, showing at the French village cinema last Sunday evening? To help me decide, I looked at what the compendious movie website Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. The scores on the Tomatometer were disquieting. Ninety-six per cent of the 202 reviews by critics deemed it a hit, whereas only 78 per cent of 4,129 reviews posted by the general public agreed. Interesting. Normally, if a film is worth seeing, the film critics’ scores and the mob’s are roughly in alignment at 90 per cent or above. But when they differ by as much as this, one suspects that the film is pretentious or propaganda, or both.

I read a sample of the ‘top’ critics’ reviews. The Death of Stalin is both a comedy and a satire, they said. (An inevitable few thought it a satire of the current Trump administration.) Well, I like a good laugh as much as the next bloke, and I can live with a satire against Donald Trump. But is it actually funny? Will I laugh my head off? The majority of these top critics certainly thought so. ‘Raucously hilarious’, ‘An antic delight’, ‘The funniest film of the year so far’, ‘The funniest, smartest, most unforgiving comedy in years, and the best satiric film of the 2010s’. Wow. That last one tipped the balance. I scoffed my tea, polished my glasses and drove to the village cinema.

I’ve heard a rumour that the village mayor was pissed off last year because he thought the cinema was showing too many English language films, and had ordered the cinema committee to put on more French stuff. So I imagined that this recent comparative rarity of English language films would mean the place would be packed out with the monolingual British ex-pat community enjoying their moment in the cultural sun.